The “anything” job (and our new product)

by Giff on September 7, 2010

Big company people are used to delegation, resources at their disposal, and the benefit of a strong brand name. As startup people, we have none of that. Our job description is “whatever it takes.”

Like most founders, I wear a lot of hats at Aprizi. While I had been creating the product mockups in Balsamiq and Photoshop, I had not actually been implementing them. My CSS skills were very rudimentary, but we had a talented web-dev friend helping us out and this allowed me to focus on other important things. In our latest product push, however, he was not going to be available, so I had to decide whether to take the time to learn CSS or to pay someone to handle implementation for us.

We only raised $35K at the start of the year and had purposefully pushed off trying to raise more until this Fall. We choose our expenditures very carefully. In this case, it was far more useful to save cash for something I cannot do, such as our iPhone app, than something i can learn.

So I picked up a book, CSS: The Missing Manual from O’Reilly, and knuckled down for several days. To be honest, this is the first book on CSS that actually made sense to me. It felt painful to put other activities on hold, but the time investment really helped us leap forward once I got up the initial learning curve. I admit, wearing my scrappy “product designer” hat, I really enjoyed digging into the dev environment and making the changes I wanted without having to wait on anyone. It is the kind of thing you have to do as founder, but rarely can justify doing as CEO once you start growing, so I try to revel in it while I can.

On Friday, we put up a new beta version of Aprizi (for those lacking context, we’re trying to solve the problem of how much of a chore it is to discover great but smaller brands, boutiques and designers). We have some bugs to kill, and the personalization stuff has not really been put in yet, but it is a much better starting point.

I don’t bill myself as the best designer in the world, but I hope you like the new site. Please let me know your feedback at giff@aprizi.com.

aprizihomepage-9-2-10

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  • http://twitter.com/brianmwang Brian Wang

    Love seeing this, Giff. It’s interesting to note that there is limited value in learning how to do some of this stuff through books alone. I’ve found that the most learning and skill acquiring occurs in just trying to produce something production ready. After swearing off doing tutorials just for the sake of learning material, I’m already starting to notice a bit of a frame shift in my thinking.

  • http://giffconstable.com giffc

    Totally agree, to really learn this stuff you *have* to actually try to build something, and ideally something you actually care about. It can’t be all theory. I did do a bunch of up-front reading at the start — my problem was I had dabbled with CSS in a very haphazard way prior, but found it very quirky and confusing, and I had never really taken the time to understand the structure, when to use float versus absolute/relative, etc. The book helped demystify it.

  • http://twitter.com/cameronpriest Cameron Priest

    Giff, been following your blog for a fair while now. nnLove the content. nnLike the design improvements – but, I would be happy to spend a couple of hours helping you polish the front end. nnThink of it as a gift for the fantastic content you produce.nnLet me know if you’re interested.nnsend me an emailnn[anything]@neuzee.com

  • http://giffconstable.com giffc

    Thank you Cameron. And you’re a New Zealander. Most beautiful country in the world. My attempt to convince my wife to move to Temuka failed, but she’s from Sydney so what do you expect? ;-) I look forward to talking more.